System generation for nobility card

[nerdygerdy]

I bought a copy of T5 for my best friend (who no longer games, but likes to reminisce) and wanted to send him a write-up explaining all the system details behind his card's world in hopes that it may inspire his 9 year-old to delve into Traveller.

Here's my stupid question: Since the card already has an established world in the OTU, I wasn't sure if those extra details (star, planets, orbits, satellites, etc.) just need to be randomly generated using System Generation by me or if they already exist somewhere (99.9% certain they don't).

Or, if there's a thread here that already asks/answers/discusses what I'm after, pre-thanks for the re-direction!

 

[ekervina]

Depends on the world. Some worlds are very well developed in various sources, others are little more than a UPP and a single brief mention somewhere.

 

[Fovean]

Try the Traveller wiki, a lot of worlds have some extended system data listed. Could save you some work.


http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Main_Page

 

[Drakon]

This is a cool idea, but I am curious what is and is not canon. I take it that Travellerwiki and Travellermap.com are both canon?

Assuming there is no existing map of the homeworld, creating one can be quite interesting.

 

[rancke]

This is a cool idea, but I am curious what is and is not canon. I take it that Travellerwiki and Travellermap.com are both canon?

Anything on the Traveller wiki that isn't canon is (supposed to be) marked as non-canon.


Hans

 

[Selandia]

This is a cool idea, but I am curious what is and is not canon. I take it that Travellerwiki and Travellermap.com are both canon?

Travellermap.com is far from always canon, the sources they use are noted and you then make your own mind as to how canon is the info. As an exemple, I do not care for them when they contradict Paranoia Press' Beyond and Vanguard Reaches. Look how Foreven is devoid of pocket empire in the T5 book's map and how they show it. Of course Foreven is referee's preserve and they can write almost anything they wishes, but so can you and I in Foreven

They populated many sectors that are not given name in T5 map. So how canon they are? Go have a look and make your mind.

Have fun
Selandia

 

[nerdygerdy]

canons to the left of me

The card I got is for an asteroid belt. So what I'm after here is some help in figuring out the extra goodie details beyond the UWP (Jackoyo B000510-B)that will provide fun reading material for my bud and his kid.

I am trying to figure out the type of star, if it's just one planetoid belt or multiple belts in different orbits, and (if flux determines there's a companion), if that means there's separate belts for each star.

 

[Drakon]

What is the world? Maybe we can help.

 

[esampson]

Jackoyo is in the Concord Sector of the Solomani Rim. It has two stars a F8 V and a M0 V. Population is around 500,000 and is largely controlled through a Corporatocracy. It has no gas giants and a single asteroid belt which houses most of its population. It is listed as non-industrial.

That's all the material that is canon concerning Jackoyo. Reading a little bit deeper into it I would guess that its economy is probably largely based around mining (seems like the best reason for a company to have 500,000 people out in an asteroid belt who aren't manufacturing things). Most likely the materials being extracted from the asteroids are something you can't find in abundance elsewhere since the material needs to be mined, refined, and then sent out of system. Since it's a large scale operation it probably isn't a luxury like gemstones that are being mined but something where the refinery has to chew up lots and lots of ore to get a bit of return (like how platinum is currently mined).

So most likely they are digging up some kind of rare earth or exotic particle like magnetic monopoles. Maybe tiny fragments of a neutron star that somehow exploded in the unrecorded past (and by tiny I mean parts so small they probably can't be seen). It probably wouldn't have the full density of neutron-degenerate matter but maybe such post-degenerate matter still retrains some unusual characteristics?

 

[nerdygerdy]

coolness

Thanks - great info! What was your source?

No idea if what I found is considered a reliable, canonical source, but this list sure looks like the old world list from the Solomani Rim supplement I remember from long ago: (http://traveller.mu.org/java/sectors/solomanirim.sec )
Jackoyo 2102 B000510-B Ni As 500 Im F8 V M0 D

1) I wasn't sure what the "500" meant. The legend labels this column as "PBG" and I just cannot remember what that referred to... my guess is P=5, B=0, and G=0, but no idea what any of that means.

2) This source lists the second (companion?) star as a M0 D versus an MO V. How to account for the discrepancy between this source and the source you (esampson) used? Is it a typo? A different classification system being used?

3) Since there are two stars, but apparently just one belt (all according to the canonical source), how do I determine on page 437 which of the two stars gets the one belt?

3) I'm sure this is funnier to me, but my buddy and I (probably like some others) used to entertain ourselves as kids by rolling up Belters just to see how long they'd survive a term of service (he unearthed from his old gaming archives a few 3x5 index cards with rows of Belter UPPs and "KIA" written over them during a visit a few years ago). We'd get bored of that and then play "Belter" by firing up Asteroids on his old Atari and simply push the joystick forward/up and fly the ship "north" until achieving top speed and then let off the gas and try to survive by dodging asteroids.

4) I should go read the other thread about nobles and their lands -- I'm trying to figure out a good story for why, as a Knight of the Iridium Throne, my bud "owns" an asteroid mining operation run by a corporation. Did he inherit daddy's company? Or did he just inherit the asteroid belt? Or was it (company? belt?) a gift when receiving his Knighthood? Thanks for the rocks, space dad.

5) Let's say Jackoyo was in a sector for which nothing, canonical or not, has ever been written other than just the UWP. From there, do I just follow pages 436 and 437 for stars/spectral type/orbits, until I get to the point where I know it's a planetoid belt? And, referring back to #3, how do I know how far out to place the belt once I figure out which star gets the belt?

6) Pretending that I'm making up a companion star system from scratch, is it even possible to have a belt for each star? But (I'm not an astrophysicist btw) wouldn't the two stars' gravity screw with each other's belt and wreak all sorts of space havoc? Page 437 says for Placing Worlds: "Place Planetoid Belts ... Rotate Placement Per Star" which to me says "yes, newbie, you can have multiple belts for a single star system and for a companion system, each star can also have a belt." But what about multiple belts for a single star system or multiple belts for companion systems?

I should get back to work. Thanks for your comments!

 

[rancke]

Thanks - great info! What was your source?

No idea if what I found is considered a reliable, canonical source, but this list sure looks like the old world list from the Solomani Rim supplement I remember from long ago: (http://traveller.mu.org/java/sectors/solomanirim.sec )
Jackoyo 2102 B000510-B Ni As 500 Im F8 V M0 D

1) I wasn't sure what the "500" meant. The legend labels this column as "PBG" and I just cannot remember what that referred to... my guess is P=5, B=0, and G=0, but no idea what any of that means.

Population, belts, gas giants. The system has an sovereign population of five people[*], no planetoid belts[**] and no gas giants.

[*] Just how a system gets a sovereign population of five people is left as an exercise for the referee to explain, as is figuring up what happens to the population if a ship with a crew of 10 decides to stay around for a bit.

[**] Well, it has one belt, but mainworld belts are not counted in the 'B' figure.​

EDIT: 500,000 people, not five people. I misread the UWP.


Hans

 

[HG_B]

Population, belts, gas giants. The system has an sovereign population of five people[*], no planetoid belts[**] and no gas giants.

[*] Just how a system gets a sovereign population of five people is left as an exercise for the referee to explain, as is figuring up what happens to the population if a ship with a crew of 10 decides to stay around for a bit.

[**] Well, it has one belt, but mainworld belts are not counted in the 'B' figure.​

Hans

How do they run a Class B starport & shipyard with 5 people?

 

[pendragonman]

Population, belts, gas giants. The system has an sovereign population of five people[*], no planetoid belts[**] and no gas giants.

[*] Just how a system gets a sovereign population of five people is left as an exercise for the referee to explain, as is figuring up what happens to the population if a ship with a crew of 10 decides to stay around for a bit.

[**] Well, it has one belt, but mainworld belts are not counted in the 'B' figure.​

Hans

A pop digit of "5" is not five people. It is an order of magnitude. A pop digit of "5" is 10^5 or hundreds of thousands. T5 reference is the chart on page 433. CT reference book 3 page 7

 

[esampson]

Thanks - great info! What was your source?

wiki.travellerrpg.com (http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Solomani_Rim_Sector/data)

I believe they say they are using the data from Mongoose Traveller. One hiccup is that sometime canonical data will contradict itself between versions (and see below). The other is that I guess that a luminosity class of V is either a main sequence or a dwarf star (which is why some people use D to segregate out the dwarfs).

No idea if what I found is considered a reliable, canonical source, but this list sure looks like the old world list from the Solomani Rim supplement I remember from long ago: (http://traveller.mu.org/java/sectors/solomanirim.sec )
Jackoyo 2102 B000510-B Ni As 500 Im F8 V M0 D

1) I wasn't sure what the "500" meant. The legend labels this column as "PBG" and I just cannot remember what that referred to... my guess is P=5, B=0, and G=0, but no idea what any of that means.

P is a "population multiple". The last three digits of the UWP before the dash indicate a rough idea of the population, the type of government, and the law level. In this case those numbers are 510. The 5 in this case means you are looking at a population measured in 100,000's (the 5 meaning the number of zeros). With the additional 5 in the 'P' column that means you are looking at a population of around 5 x 100,000 or 500,000.
B means the number of belts in a system. What that means is that the 0 there is an oversight because clearly the system has at least 1 belt (so sometimes canonical material even contradicts itself). The G means the number of gas giants in the system (in this case 0).

2) This source lists the second (companion?) star as a M0 D versus an MO V. How to account for the discrepancy between this source and the source you (esampson) used? Is it a typo? A different classification system being used?

Pretty much a variation in the classification system, I believe. Alternately maybe the star is right on the cusp and at some point was reclassified (given the lifespan of stars I doubt that even over 1000 years the star has changed enough to actually move classifications)

3) Since there are two stars, but apparently just one belt (all according to the canonical source), how do I determine on page 437 which of the two stars gets the one belt?

You have to pick, I believe, but it would most likely be in orbit around the primary rather than the dwarf (or proto-dwarf depending on your interpretation).

. . .

4) I should go read the other thread about nobles and their lands -- I'm trying to figure out a good story for why, as a Knight of the Iridium Throne, my bud "owns" an asteroid mining operation run by a corporation. Did he inherit daddy's company? Or did he just inherit the asteroid belt? Or was it (company? belt?) a gift when receiving his Knighthood? Thanks for the rocks, space dad.

Well, 500,000 people is an awfully big company town. Even if you assume only 20% of the people actually work for the company and everyone else are people like teachers, grocers, mechanics (who do not work for the corporation) and other people necessary to support a community that's still 100,000 people. In contrast the largest diamond mine on Earth has 3,100 workers. That's why I came up with the idea that whatever it is that they are doing it is very large scale. Given that there is no industry whatever they are mining must be sent out of the system. The only way I can see that as working would be if they were digging up something extremely valuable that requires the processing of lots and lots of material to get tiny, tiny bits of it. If it didn't take that much material to get tiny bits you would probably have smaller numbers of people. If it wasn't extremely valuable then why would people be bothering?

Basically Dad left you an Unobtanium mine.

5) Let's say Jackoyo was in a sector for which nothing, canonical or not, has ever been written other than just the UWP. From there, do I just follow pages 436 and 437 for stars/spectral type/orbits, until I get to the point where I know it's a planetoid belt? And, referring back to #3, how do I know how far out to place the belt once I figure out which star gets the belt?

I'm not fully conversant with the latest Systemmaker. Maybe someone else can help you there.

6) Pretending that I'm making up a companion star system from scratch, is it even possible to have a belt for each star? But (I'm not an astrophysicist btw) wouldn't the two stars' gravity screw with each other's belt and wreak all sorts of space havoc? Page 437 says for Placing Worlds: "Place Planetoid Belts ... Rotate Placement Per Star" which to me says "yes, newbie, you can have multiple belts for a single star system and for a companion system, each star can also have a belt." But what about multiple belts for a single star system or multiple belts for companion systems?

While it is almost certainly possible for a system to have a belt around each star from my (admittedly highly limited) knowledge of system formation it probably isn't very common. I believe conventional theory is that most binary systems have a few orbits around the primary and almost nothing around the secondary. Especially when the secondary is a dwarf. The exception to this would be a binary system where the stars are extremely close and you have all planets orbiting both stars around their barycenter (and such a system would not have the closest in planets due to the fluctuations such an arrangement would cause). I'm far from an expert on such matters, however.

I should get back to work. Thanks for your comments!

Any time

 

[rancke]

A pop digit of "5" is not five people. It is an order of magnitude. A pop digit of "5" is 10^5 or hundreds of thousands. T5 reference is the chart on page 433. CT reference book 3 page 7

A pop multiplier of 5 is five times 10 to the power of the pop digit, in the present case five people, since the pop multiplier... oh, wait... my mistake. The pop digit is 5, not 0. I had misread it. So the multiplier of five means 500,000 people, not five.


Hans

 

[nerdygerdy]

Population, belts, gas giants. The system has an sovereign population of five people[*], no planetoid belts[**] and no gas giants.

[*] Just how a system gets a sovereign population of five people is left as an exercise for the referee to explain, as is figuring up what happens to the population if a ship with a crew of 10 decides to stay around for a bit.

[**] Well, it has one belt, but mainworld belts are not counted in the 'B' figure.​

Hans

Oof. That's embarrassing. Duh. People/Belts/Giants. Thanks much!

Now, your second note makes me want to go looking for a size 0 world with a number -- any number -- in that "B" column

By the way, can anyone verify the site I listed above as canonical?

Hate to nag, but does anyone have any thoughts on the discrepancy between the stellar class for the companion star I mentioned?

Boss a' comin... out.

 

[esampson]

Oof. That's embarrassing. Duh. People/Belts/Giants. Thanks much!

Now, your second note makes me want to go looking for a size 0 world with a number -- any number -- in that "B" column

By the way, can anyone verify the site I listed above as canonical?

Hate to nag, but does anyone have any thoughts on the discrepancy between the stellar class for the companion star I mentioned?

Boss a' comin... out.

My source actually lists PBG as 510.

 

[nerdygerdy]

check my math...

OK, now I totally see why that would be different between two sources. Some might say "no extra belts" and others "well, its belt has to account for itself"

So, for another example for population to make sure I have the PBG squared-away:

Grille 3026 E410335-7 Lo Ni 701 Im F0 V M5 D

So "3" in the UWP means "thousands" and the "7" in PBG means 7,000 as the rough population for Grille.

 

[nerdygerdy]

wiki.travellerrpg.com (http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Solomani_Rim_Sector/data)

Well, 500,000 people is an awfully big company town. Even if you assume only 20% of the people actually work for the company and everyone else are people like teachers, grocers, mechanics (who do not work for the corporation) and other people necessary to support a community that's still 100,000 people. In contrast the largest diamond mine on Earth has 3,100 workers. That's why I came up with the idea that whatever it is that they are doing it is very large scale. Given that there is no industry whatever they are mining must be sent out of the system. The only way I can see that as working would be if they were digging up something extremely valuable that requires the processing of lots and lots of material to get tiny, tiny bits of it. If it didn't take that much material to get tiny bits you would probably have smaller numbers of people. If it wasn't extremely valuable then why would people be bothering?

Basically Dad left you an Unobtanium mine.

Regarding Jackoyo's 500,000 people, does "population" only refer to sophonts? Or can the population include synthetics/androids, such that 490,000 teeny tiny (self-replicating?) MineBots are doing all the dirty work to find the aforementioned Unobtanium while 10,000 air-breathin' folk watch the screens, bake the cookies, wash the windows etc? I knooow that's a stretch. Are synthetics counted in population in T5? Does a B tech level seem high enough for 490,000 self-replicating MineBots? (**aside... I just read page 501 and see that TL 16 is where artificials/self-aware mechanisms replace sophonts, so B don't quite cut it for what I'm trying to make up).

Maybe the whole operation is about looking for a needle in a haystack. They're looking for one solitary thing in all those rocks. And it takes ~500,000 people to do it, even at tech level B. Like they'll only know it when they see it, so it has to be a hands-on operation with lots of bodies in vacc suits cracking open rocks.

I guess it might be fun to figure out how Jackoyo became an asteroid belt in the first place and go from there.

This sounds dumb, but Jackoyo was a former mainworld and was destroyed centuries/longer ago and the former surviving inhabitants "left something" there that would have survived the planet's destruction, but it's buried in the rock. The company's large-scale, low-tech-at-a-high-tech-level mining operation is legit -- "yep, we're hiring more and more folks every month, business is booming", but the company has unknowingly hired a significant number of descendants of the original mainworld who escaped off-world before the Big Boom. And now they've come home to find JackOffium.

It probably doesn't play well in the OTU, but my bud will laugh himself silly.

I should probably go.

 

[rancke]

4) I should go read the other thread about nobles and their lands -- I'm trying to figure out a good story for why, as a Knight of the Iridium Throne, my bud "owns" an asteroid mining operation run by a corporation. Did he inherit daddy's company? Or did he just inherit the asteroid belt? Or was it (company? belt?) a gift when receiving his Knighthood? Thanks for the rocks, space dad.

Despite past writers missing the implication, a government code of 1 doesn't just mean a system is run by a corporation; it means it is run AS a corporation, and a corporation whose stockholders live in that system. A company world with a board of directors appointed by stockholders living somewhere outside the system would properly have a government code of 6. From there the details depend on just who own the stock. If it's concentrated on a few hands you get something closer to an oligarchy or even a monarchy. If it's distributed among most or all the inhabitants, it's much more like a democracy.

Incidentally, if your bud owns enough stock to control a company with 125,000 workers[*], he's an exceedingly rich man.

[*] Or whatever fraction of the population you believe are adult active workers.​

Hans